I finally built up the courage to tell one of my teachers this fact: The more Japanese the school lunch, the less delicious it is. The best school lunch menus are curry rice day and cream stew with bread day, which are Indian and, what, English? The worst is the mushrooms that coagulate the soup, which tastes like crap. That’s Japanese.
One day someone found a bit of seaweed or a mushroom and discovered that it was edible, so they decided to eat it - but only because there was nothing else available. Time passes and food that people originally ate out of necessity is then called “traditional” - like the fish that is covered in putrid sauce and is mostly skin. I would only eat that if I were desperate or in a war. If you put Caesar salad and smoked salmon in front of someone they wouldn’t turn round and say “Actually I was thinking about putting mushrooms and seaweed in a bowl of water.”
What I want is more screening of the food that reaches my school lunch tray. At the moment the screening process seems to be –
Is it safe to eat?
Yes.
Stick it in.
And this leads to people eating crab, for which you need a special fork to scrape out the edible parts. A special fork to scrape out the edible parts. Not worth it. In a perfect world the screening process would be –
Is it safe to eat?
Yes.
Is it tasty?
Maybe.
Would I ever choose to eat this over any of the food that is freely available today?
No.
Then forget it, get rid of it.
With this system things that look like erasers and soggy paper would definitely not make the cut. The Japanese style lunch menus appear to be people doing the best with what they’ve got, like making a lawnmower on Scrapheap Challenge. But outside of Scrapheap Challenge, the contestants will most likely just buy an actual lawnmower when they need a lawnmower. We don’t need to scrape together a meal using whatever edible things the Earth has to offer. Why am I eating fish eggs? Why is that happening? There are at least four proper delicious kinds of fish available, isn’t that enough? Let’s just make the tasty ones extinct first and work our way down.
One day someone found a bit of seaweed or a mushroom and discovered that it was edible, so they decided to eat it - but only because there was nothing else available. Time passes and food that people originally ate out of necessity is then called “traditional” - like the fish that is covered in putrid sauce and is mostly skin. I would only eat that if I were desperate or in a war. If you put Caesar salad and smoked salmon in front of someone they wouldn’t turn round and say “Actually I was thinking about putting mushrooms and seaweed in a bowl of water.”
What I want is more screening of the food that reaches my school lunch tray. At the moment the screening process seems to be –
Is it safe to eat?
Yes.
Stick it in.
And this leads to people eating crab, for which you need a special fork to scrape out the edible parts. A special fork to scrape out the edible parts. Not worth it. In a perfect world the screening process would be –
Is it safe to eat?
Yes.
Is it tasty?
Maybe.
Would I ever choose to eat this over any of the food that is freely available today?
No.
Then forget it, get rid of it.
With this system things that look like erasers and soggy paper would definitely not make the cut. The Japanese style lunch menus appear to be people doing the best with what they’ve got, like making a lawnmower on Scrapheap Challenge. But outside of Scrapheap Challenge, the contestants will most likely just buy an actual lawnmower when they need a lawnmower. We don’t need to scrape together a meal using whatever edible things the Earth has to offer. Why am I eating fish eggs? Why is that happening? There are at least four proper delicious kinds of fish available, isn’t that enough? Let’s just make the tasty ones extinct first and work our way down.
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